Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil

Gérard Grisey – Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil for soprano and 15 strumenti (1996-1997).
Almost a premonition, the last composition by Grisey who died in 1998.

I conceived the Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four Songs to Cross the Threshold) as a musical meditation on death in four aspects: the death of the angel, the death of civilization, the death of the voice, and the death of humanity. The four movements are separated by brief interludes, soft sonic dusts, intended to maintain a level of tension slightly higher than the polite yet relaxed silence that reigns in concert halls between the end of one movement and the beginning of the next. The selected texts belong to four civilizations (Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian) and share a fragmented discourse on the inevitability of death. The choice of ensemble was dictated by the musical need to counter the lightness of the soprano voice with a grave, heavy, yet sumptuous and colorful mass.
[Gérard Grisey]

The 4 canti:

Prelude: La mort de l’ange – D’après Les heures de la nuit de Christian Guez-Ricord
Interlude: La mort de la civilisation – D’après les Sarcophages égyptiens du Moyen Empire
Interlude: La mort de la voix – D’après Erinna
Faux Interlude: La mort de l’humanite – D’après L’Épopée de Gilgamesh

The text of the first part, taken from Les Heures de la Nuit by Christian Guez-Ricord (La Sétérée, Jacques Clerc Editeur, 1992)

De qui se doit
de mourir
comme un ange
……………….

comme il se doit de mourir
comme un ange
je me dois
de mourir
moi-même

il se doit son mourir
son ange est de mourir
comme il s’est mort
comme un ange

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